Recent reviews by Nicky

Considering that first person shooters are my bread and butter, that's saying something. The heart stopping tension of hiding prone in the mud while soldiers walk mere inches away from you and surveillance drones ready to nuke you from orbit can be heard passing somewhere above in the pitch black midnight sky is a level of tension that I don’t think any other singleplayer FPS I’ve played has topped. However, most people will never experience the best of what Breakpoint has to offer because the default settings achieve a level of default-settings-cancer that is only comparable to the likes of Team Fortress 2. For the sake of this review, I’ll only list the most important, game changing settings you should change and my reasoning behind it.

Gear Level: OFF
This basically makes the game feel less like a tac shooter and more like an MMORPG. I don't care about grinding weapon stats.

Difficulty - Enemies: Extreme
In my experience, the AI in this game is laughably oblivious on any difficulty lower than Extreme, trivializes the game to the point that it’s not fun anymore. Even if you find yourself dying a lot on the highest AI difficulty, I would actually change some other settings listed below before I would touch the AI difficulty.

Interface: Custom
I wrote a whole Steam guide on this part, but here are the most important ones.

Weapon and Item Display: Never
Start with it on to get a basic idea of your ammo count for each gun, but once you play with this off for long enough, you’ll learn to keep a mental count of your mags and rounds left which adds a lot to immersion.

HUD Markers - Enemies: Off
TURNING THIS OFF IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SETTING IN THE GAME. The difference between having this turned on and having this turned off is the difference between playing a point and click adventure game and playing the tactical shooter that you actually paid for. Turning this setting on effectively gives you wallhacks. Paired with the Epsilon class ability to reveal and tag enemies through walls, this setting singlehandedly trivializes the game to such a level that only a mentally impaired chimpanzee (or a video game journalist) could find this game interesting. All that being said though, I actually recommend leaving this setting on Dynamic while you’re first starting out with the game so that you can grasp the fundamentals of recon and learn more about enemy patterns, formations, and behavior. The moment you feel like you can turn this setting off is the moment you’ve completed the tutorial.

Minimap: Off
Possibly the single most immersion breaking feature of modern AAA games is minimaps. Every game that gives you one is a game where you probably spent more time looking at lines and arrows in the corner of your screen than actually taking in the scenery you’re actually walking through. Absolutely zero reason to have it on, just press M to bring up the map when you need it.

Exploration mode: Not Guided
The game specifically states this is the way Breakpoint is meant to be played. This setting basically means no yellow tape, no glowing arrows on the map, they just give you a description of the location or a picture plus a general area. It’s up to you to track down the exact location. It adds a layer of recon and exploration to the game, and I’ve never once found it so frustratingly hard to find something that I gave up. This setting is a must for immersion.

With all that setup out of the way, let’s talk about gameplay. I found that Breakpoint is best played alone with no teammates, human or AI. Yes, that’s right. This game is more fun alone than with friends. This might come as a shock for some people, but if you’ve ever played a horror game alone in a dark room vs with friends, you probably understand why. In a game that so heavily relies on building tension and being as immersive as possible, playing with friends in a discord call is like playing a completely different game. Don’t get me wrong it’s still an alright experience, but it’s not anything that merits any Steam review score higher than mostly positive where it currently sits, and it’s definitely inferior to multiplayer in Wildlands. However, when played alone without even using teammate AI, this game shines brighter than Wildlands in all the best ways. The gunplay feels better than Wildlands. The perks and skill tree are much more interesting, the environments are more vibrant, the stealth feels more realistic, and the game looks better and runs better at the same time. As for story, some people say that the story of Wildlands is better, but in my opinion, both of these games are closer to being blatant CIA propaganda campaigns than well written coherent stories, and asking me to pick one over the other is like asking me if I would rather eat cow droppings or horse manure. If you’re looking for a game with a good story, not only are you looking in the wrong game series, you’re probably looking in the wrong game genre too. Putting the actual plot of both games aside however, the one key thing that Wildlands has over Breakpoint is that the story is much more lighthearted and easy to ignore than Breakpoint. Be prepared to spend a good portion of your first few hours in breakpoint slogging through infodump cutscenes before the game really opens up.

If you’re someone who thinks that installing mods to fix problems that should’ve been fixed by the devs makes a game bad, I would probably have to agree with you.

However, I also don’t care.

With that out of the way, here’s two and a half mods that I recommend for the best Breakpoint experience.

First Person View
This mod transforms Breakpoint from a third person shooter to a first person shooter. While this mod definitely has its fair share of minor visual bugs, I still consider it absolutely essential for crafting the most immersive experience possible. I don’t think I would ever play this game without this mod, though just make sure to have a convenient bind to switch from first person to third person. You’ll probably also want to install the First Person DoF Blur Removal mod. I installed it through ReShade which I also used to make the nights in this game a lot darker and most of the environment look better.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint Spartan Mod
At some point you’re gonna reach a point where even on the hardest settings, the game is still too easy and the AI are still too dumb. That’s where this mod comes in. I don’t recommend installing it until you have a solid grasp of the game, but just keep it in mind as an option.

To the right person, this game is much much better than Wildlands. If you’re just looking for a game to kill time and pop heads while you jam to some music, there are definitely better games for that out there, Wildlands included. If you’re looking to relax and goof around with friends in an open world sandbox, Wildlands is also the better option. However, if you gravitate towards games like ARMA and Squad, you’re okay with modding a game to squeeze that extra 110% out of it, and you enjoy immersing yourself into a game as much as possible, this game is definitely worth the full sixty dollar asking price. Now would I actually pay sixty dollars for Breakpoint? Hell no. Even if I value the game at sixty dollars, Ubisoft sure as hell don’t, as the game is on sale for 80% off seemingly every other week. Pick this game up on a deep sale, and don’t let the few hours of hand holding the game does deceive you, this game can be as hard and as tense as you want it to be.

You're basically paying eight dollars for an less than an hour composed of a vn written by an r/atheism moderator, baby's first scratch game, dev credits, and a based forty second brick breaker game. If you need more kangel in your life then by all means go for it, but I can't recommend any game on the planet with an eight dollar per hour playtime ratio.

I can't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ believe someone got doxxed over a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dream sequence that you have to go out of your way to get and would never be able to get accidentally where two fictional characters talk post coital in a vision that didn't even happen in a scene that was completely played up for comedic effect. Sneed harder, this coal is a gemerald.

I used to play this game in my head as a kid staring out the car window so the fact that someone turned it into a real video game and then got Makeup and Vanity Set to do the soundtrack for it is pretty surreal. Can't reccomend this game enough.

I was gonna write a long review on how much I hate this game and how much of a step down it is from the first two games, but I couldn't even bring myself to finish it, it's that bad. The concept of playing as anyone you want ends up being the game's greatest weakness, as the dialogue becomes very cookie cutter and generic to fit any character. The dialogue has absolutely no soul in it and I found myself spacebaring through all the dialogue after just three hours of playtime because it was hard to stomach. The early game is way too slow and boring, and the city of London feels totally fake. As a matter of fact, I can't think of a single aspect of the game I enjoyed at all, especially compared to the last two entries which are two of my favorite games of all time. Definitely pass on this one, it's hot garbage.

This game gets a positive review from me because the art and the writing are both so good that I can’t in good faith leave a bad review. That being said, this game has enough issues that if Steam let me leave a mixed/neutral review I would absolutely be doing that instead. I’ll try not to waste too much of your time, so let me just rapid fire some takeaways.

Art is subjectively good. You’ve seen the trailer. If you didn’t like what you saw in the trailer, you probably won’t like the game.

Writing is superb, they really capture the mannerisms and exaggerated swagger of a mentally ill chick, often too well. There were quite a few times where I took a step back and went, “Jesus Christ she’s literally acting like a real woman.” which is pretty rare for video game writing.

Soundtrack is pretty good but used terribly. 95% of the game will be spent listening to roughly 2 tracks that loop indefinitely and will drive you insane if you play the game for longer than an hour at a time.

Gameplay is essentially a resource management sim where you only have to manage a single person which makes for a braindead easy game, yet some of the ending requirements are too similar to reliably shoot for. If you’re going for a 100% completion (which is required for the true ending), you’re gonna be spending more time looking at the wiki than the game.

Shock value is something the game heavily relies on as you progress later into the game. The problem is that apart from a couple moments, the game really isn’t that shocking. If you’re someone that’s especially sensitive to drug abuse or self harm then maybe you’d find it disturbing, but I found it underwhelming for the most part.

There’s also supposed to be some sort of broader message about streaming culture and social media but even as someone who doesn’t interface with either, I still found it annoyingly preachy.

So do I recommend the game? Yeah I do, at least to the right person. Is the game worth the full 16 dollars? Hell no. Wait for a 50% off sale at the minimum.

The only reason this game is on Steam is because Blizzard's partnership with NetEase, their distributor in China, fell through. Needing another in with the Chinese market, Activision Blizzard turned to Valve, their biggest competitor in the PC games space, for their Perfect World partnership. Subpar game made by a disgusting company who would sell their souls to the devil for a couple bucks and a better view in hell. Up yours, Activision Blizzard.

This game is gonna give me carpal tunnel in 2 years.

This game has more in common with crack than Sudoku, and I mean that in the best way possible. It's definitely on the easier side even on hard mode, but your mileage may vary depending on your experience level with puzzle games. I was able to 100% it in half a dozen sessions on the Steam Deck, and I can absolutely recommend it at full price although it is worth noting that the sale price is 59 cents.

For me personally, this game has taken Audiosurf 2's crown as the best auto genererated rhythm game, and I think that's really the highest praise you can give any game in the rhythm genre. if you're one of us freaks who hoards terabytes of mp3s and flacs, then picking this game up is honestly a no brainer. My only complaint about the game is that there isn't a big enough playerbase to generate competitive leaderboards on lesser known songs, but that's not really something you can hold against the developer.